MFStools Boot CD - LBA48 Boot Disk for ALL TiVo Models

I have a dtv 2 and was also a little confused as to which kernel applied (becuase its hard to tell if Series 1 modifies standalone or also dtv). Your instructions are great, and helpful, but a recommended rewording is to change:

"If you are intending to use larger than 137GB drives in a Series1 standalone or DirecTiVo system"

to

"If you are intending to use larger than 137GB drives in a Series1 standalone or Series 1 DirecTiVo system"

I have a question about large drives with a S2 that doesnt have the native LBA48 kernel:

Originally posted by tivoupgrade
This CD uses an LBA48 Linux kernel which is designed for use with all hard disk drives, including drives that are larger than 137GB. This CD may be used to perform standard MFStools backup and restore operations for ALL make/model TiVo systems which are upgradeable. HOWEVER, do not use this CD to restore a backup onto a drive LARGER than 137GB unless it will be used in a TiVo system whose kernel uses a comparable native LBA48 kernel.

So if I'm reading this correctly, one can use this CD to upgrade using a larger than 137GB drive on a S2 non native LBA48 kernel (like 24004A), but you will not be able to use this CD to restore it.
Is that correct? If so what suggestions do you have if you need to restore it?

Originally posted by Robert S I'm not sure whether that's poor phrasing on Lou's part or overly close reading on yours.

Anyway, there's no problem restoring backups, the problem is expanding (typically you would restore and expand in one operation).

If you don't have an LBA-48 kernel on your TiVo, just use the standard mfstools2noJ.iso instead of this CD.

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Or, don't use drives larger than 137GB (ie, use 120GB drives). Will try to reword things so that they are clearer. Eventually, will have additional kernel so that CD can be used for any unit, whether LBA48 or not.

A new release (beta) is now available with the aforementioned dd_rescue utilitity.

Additionally, we've included a new utility (still under testing) which allows you to upgrade your Toshibs SD-400 unit with a simple mfsrestore to a large drive using mfstools, followed by the running of the unlock utility on the PC you are using to perform the upgrade. There is a readme file on the CD with additional info.

Please use the following page as your jump point for downloading the CD:

Several years ago I upgraded my SVR2000, adding a second disk. Recently the Tivo system has been freezing up, obviously because of a failing drive. I downloaded PTVupgrade 3.0 and bought a 200gb Seagate. Rather than trying to copy from the 2 existing drives (thought there might be a problem with one failing), I simply restored the original Tivo.bak I had on CD from the last upgrade. Of course I lost all my recordings but they werent needed. Went thru the upgrade, restored, did the copykern s (note I forgot to put in a value after the s) and all seemed fine. Put the drive in Tivo and it boots fine but so far (two days now) it has not been able to update the listings guide, and without that TIVO complains about everything you try to do. It goes thru the process of dialing, connecting and downloading but I dont get the guide. Im looking more into that, but my bigger issue is that TIVO is reporting I have 9hrs recording time (at best recording). I sent a note to the fine folks at PTVupgrade and they said it sounds like the drive is locked, and to post here.

I noticed that when I did the install on the PC that it recognized the drive as a 200gb but Im assuming if I go home tonight and put it back in the PC and boot up its going to show something much small. I get this from reading thru all the postings regarding this subject. Seems Tivo screws with it on boot up. I have qunlock and diskutil. Had to run qunlock with my previous upgrade on a Maxtor drive. The postings all talk about Maxtor and Quantum needing to be unlocked so Im hesitant to use one or the other on my Seagate. Any suggestions? Ed Lindoo

Originally posted by elindoo Several years ago I upgraded my SVR2000, adding a second disk. Recently the Tivo system has been freezing up, obviously because of a failing drive. I downloaded PTVupgrade 3.0 and bought a 200gb Seagate. Rather than trying to copy from the 2 existing drives (thought there might be a problem with one failing), I simply restored the original Tivo.bak I had on CD from the last upgrade. Of course I lost all my recordings but they werent needed. Went thru the upgrade, restored, did the copykern s (note I forgot to put in a value after the s) and all seemed fine. Put the drive in Tivo and it boots fine but so far (two days now) it has not been able to update the listings guide, and without that TIVO complains about everything you try to do. It goes thru the process of dialing, connecting and downloading but I dont get the guide. Im looking more into that, but my bigger issue is that TIVO is reporting I have 9hrs recording time (at best recording). I sent a note to the fine folks at PTVupgrade and they said it sounds like the drive is locked, and to post here.

I noticed that when I did the install on the PC that it recognized the drive as a 200gb but Im assuming if I go home tonight and put it back in the PC and boot up its going to show something much small. I get this from reading thru all the postings regarding this subject. Seems Tivo screws with it on boot up. I have qunlock and diskutil. Had to run qunlock with my previous upgrade on a Maxtor drive. The postings all talk about Maxtor and Quantum needing to be unlocked so Im hesitant to use one or the other on my Seagate. Any suggestions? Ed Lindoo

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Try diskutil, or dlgchk... Lots of threads in the underground forum about drive locking/unlocking.

Originally posted by elindoo Went thru the upgrade, restored, did the copykern s (note I forgot to put in a value after the s) and all seemed fine. Put the drive in Tivo and it boots fine but so far (two days now) it has not been able to update the listings guide, and without that TIVO complains about everything you try to do. It goes thru the process of dialing, connecting and downloading but I dont get the guide. Im looking more into that, but my bigger issue is that TIVO is reporting I have 9hrs recording time (at best recording).

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I'm using a 200G Seagate in my SVR-2000, too. I saw two problems during this upgrade - one is that the "-x" option nor mfsadd didn't work without rebuilding the partition map. If you don't find the drive locked, run mfsinfo and see if you have extra mfs partitions on it. Another problem was that the 384M swap partition I added didn't get activated properly. I tried rerunning tpip -s, Todd's mkswap with -v1 after booting up with bswap enabled, but neither one worked. I finally made it work by running Todd's native mkswap on TiVo.

9 hours at the best quality is the original capacity, so this could be because of the expantion failure, and not having swap space at all might be the cause of guide data building problem.

Well I went back thru the doc's, more specifically the Hindsdale stuff and found that I forgot to do the mfsadd command. I guess I got so fixated on the brief instructions from the PTV boot cd that I didn't use the Hinsdale docs as suggested by the instructions on the PTV boot.

Anyway, I redid the copykern with the -s 320, ran mfsadd and Tivo is very happy now. 220hrs of basic is available.

Just upgraded from a two drive to single drive system (Seagate 200GB 7200 rpm) using the Instant Cake for a SVR 2000, no problems, took no time at all, flawless software upgrade. I had extra IDE cables so I opened side cover on computer unplugged installed IDE cables from motherboard. Used spare cable to attach spare older CD burner drive (slower model) and the new hard drive. I think I would have had a new reocrd for upgrade but I was distracted by the dust in TV box and after vacumning unit forgot to hook up drive cables in the Tivo. I had cover back on and was half way upstairs when I remembered what I had forgot to do. All in all no challenge at all. I would recomend saving an old CD drive and IDE cables to facilitate hard drive upgrades. No need to unplug your installed drives.

Originally posted by Robert S If you don't have an LBA-48 kernel on your TiVo, just use the standard mfstools2noJ.iso instead of this CD.

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Why mfstools2noj.iso instead?

Originally posted by tivoupgrade Or, don't use drives larger than 137GB (ie, use 120GB drives).

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A 160GB can be used without a problem, but you will not have access to all 160GB, only 137GB. Is that a correct statement?

Once the drive has been expanded using the ptvupgrade cd, will you have bash, telnet and tivoftpd?

I'm really only looking to add tivoweb capability (which I can add once I have telnet and bash. But I have a 160GB drive laying around and I want to put the orginal drive (from the tivo)on the shelf as a backup.

A 160GB can be used without a problem, but you will not have access to all 160GB, only 137GB. Is that a correct statement?

Once the drive has been expanded using the ptvupgrade cd, will you have bash, telnet and tivoftpd?

I'm really only looking to add tivoweb capability (which I can add once I have telnet and bash. But I have a 160GB drive laying around and I want to put the orginal drive (from the tivo)on the shelf as a backup.

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Please see the first post in this thread with the model information. In short, don't use this CD on drives greater than 137GB unless you have an LBA48 kernel in your TiVo.

As for bash/telnet/tivoftp; you need to install that yourself. This is a utility CD to assist with the upgrade process, but its not a substitute for it - you still need to follow your favorite upgrade instructions to complete an upgrade.

I attempted to backup the original Tivo drive with the inclusion of recorded programs, totaling about 230,000 MB. I typed the command parmhd -d1 to enable DMA on both hda and hdb drives. Then I issued the command
dd dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb.

The PC ran over night for about 22 hours. In the morning, it had rebooted itself, and the backup drive, hddb, did not boot in my Tivo HD 10-250. I was given the impression that the dd command is a data dump that works much faster than the pair mfsbackup | mfsrestore commands. Can anybody comment on this? Thanks!

Originally posted by HDLouco I attempted to backup the original Tivo drive with the inclusion of recorded programs, totaling about 230,000 MB. I typed the command parmhd -d1 to enable DMA on both hda and hdb drives. Then I issued the command
dd dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb.

The PC ran over night for about 22 hours. In the morning, it had rebooted itself, and the backup drive, hddb, did not boot in my Tivo HD 10-250. I was given the impression that the dd command is a data dump that works much faster than the pair mfsbackup | mfsrestore commands. Can anybody comment on this? Thanks!

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I don't know if I'd be using DD for that sort of thing. Go the MFStools route; it does work. If you can get the DD method to work, benchmark results would be interesting, but I don't think its going to be faster.

Originally posted by tivoupgrade I don't know if I'd be using DD for that sort of thing. Go the MFStools route; it does work. If you can get the DD method to work, benchmark results would be interesting, but I don't think its going to be faster.

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Thanks for repplying. I followed your advice and tried backing up with
mfsbackup Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdb,
but the process terminated after scanning hda and reporting on the total size. It went back to the prompt without any further information. Could it be that the new drive is now corrupted because of the multiple attempts to copy the Tivo drive? Is there a command in your boot CD that allows a complete deletion of what ever is on the drive? Sort of FDISK in DOS? Thanks again!

Originally posted by HDLouco Thanks for repplying. I followed your advice and tried backing up with
mfsbackup Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdb,
but the process terminated after scanning hda and reporting on the total size. It went back to the prompt without any further information. Could it be that the new drive is now corrupted because of the multiple attempts to copy the Tivo drive? Is there a command in your boot CD that allows a complete deletion of what ever is on the drive? Sort of FDISK in DOS? Thanks again!

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You might have meant "-Tao" not "Tao"

Can't really say what might have happened. If you accidentally wrote to your original drive, you could have corrupting it. Reading it is another story. I suppose you could use BlessTiVo to zap the drive, not sure why you'd want to do that, however.

You might want to look/post at some of the other mfstools oriented threads to discuss the issues of creating the backup you are attempting; this is not necessarily specific to the use of our CD, just MFStools, in general.

I'm having a problem, but I'm not sure if it's because of my upgrade or not. Here's the info:

I have a Series 1 TiVo that was originally a 2-drive 30 hour model, and I upgraded it years ago with a single 120GB drive. That drive started failing, so I booted with the LBA48 CD and did a mfsbackup -> mfsrestore onto a new 160GB drive. I then used copykern to put a LBA48 compliant kernel onto it and initialize the new, bigger swap space.

The TiVo boots up fine, and everything seems to work fine (including the new, bigger swap space) EXCEPT I'm getting "Failed while loading series" errors whenever I do a Daily Call.

Is there some way to tell if this error is related to the upgrade, or if there's just a data problem on the TiVo side? I've read the various tips about fixing it but have not yet tried any of them.